Do you really mean that it's very nearly the same thing "To be a" you, and an Elon Musk, a homo sapiens infant, and an Orangutan? And only modestly different from these to be a dog or a horse?

If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.

You know, I used to bullseye small thermal exhaust ports in my T16 back home, they're not much smaller than womp rats.

Wild - I hit the same "no financial software meets my needs" around the same time as you guys (late 2020 in my case), and started building for myself as well: https://github.com/mieubrisse/wealthdraft

Only, I never had the courage to make the leap to building an actual product out of it. Huge congrats to you guys; going to take a look at Projection and see if I can finally retire my homegrown stuff!

Good question. The main problem I had was being too slow scaling up from 1 person. Building a good team is tricky, it's very hard to convince great devs to join you when you are by yourself at a time when they had a pick of jobs from FAANG. Even if you can match the salary of well funded startups, other companies can offer working with a larger team.

So you have three options: 1. hire sub-par people, 2. get VC funding to hire an entire team, or 3. continue doing most stuff by yourself.

I tried hiring sub-par people. That was a mistake, they took way more effort and negative energy than I got in return from the salary I paid them. I did not want to take on VC funding to be able create a large team at once, and in hindsight I think that was a good idea because several of my competitors did, and then had to fold 5 years later when they ran out of funding and their revenue was not high enough. (Also, the freedom of being a 100% owner and not having anyone tell you what to do was a major quality of life improvement for me that I never want to give up again once I tasted it. I hope you savor it as I do!)

So being smarter about hiring is what I would do differently, but that's easier said than done. I think the job market today probably does have more high quality devs available that don't mind being employee number two.

Edit: to add, once competitors appeared it became much more of a marketing game than a web dev game, because customers just tend to click the first three google hits. Getting good at marketing, and hiring the right people for that, is a whole other ballgame if you're a dev.